Education
University of Oxford.
University of Oxford.
Her primary field is psycholinguistics, and her research interests include human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition. Born Janet Dean, she received her Bachelor of Arts in 1964 and her Master of Arts in 1966, both from Oxford University. At Oxford she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their "equilibrium hypothesis" for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants feel the degree of intimacy suggested by a channel of nonverbal communication to be too high, they act to reduce the intimacy conveyed through other channels.
She received her Doctor of Philosophy in 1970 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looking at the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality.
In 1988, Fodor founded the City University of New York Conference on Human Sentence Processing. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997.
In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.